John and I from London to Tashkent

 First contact at Heathrow.

Uzbekistan Airlines bound for Tashkent.

Tuesday, April 15th. and into Wednesday April 16th.

I arrived at Heathrow terminal 2 with very little sleep. I had a bit of a scare in that it seemed that my luggage hadn’t arrived. It came down a different belt for some reason and had been taken off and put on the floor. I had to make my way to terminal 4 to catch the next flight. I would love to see where I walked to… long distances, lots of movators, escalators up and down and then a train to terminal 4. Couldn’t check in until 12 so I found a cafe, bought a coffee and yogurt and updated this and finished the cruise blog entries. John showed up shortly after, great to see him, big man-hug! We had a coffee together. Then we checked in with Uzbekistan Airlines and discovered that although our flights were paid for through Adventure Canada our baggage was not. That took a while to figure out and cost us both about $85 US. The flight to Tashkent was long and tedious. There were a group of young people on board who were wandering around, including a young girl sitting beside me, and made it impossible to sleep. There was also a lot of turbulence. We finally arrived at 5:30. Getting through customs and getting our luggage was easy but when we exited there was no sign of our pre arranged pickup and we were harassed by a flock of taxi drivers. One told us he’d take us to the hotel for $30 (we found out later it should have cost $5). He kept trying to take our luggage but I held our ground and kept looking for our driver. Thankfully he finally showed up which really pissed off ‘our’ driver and the two drivers had a big argument in their language before we were driven to our hotel. The hotel said we couldn’t check in that early and I had to log into the Adventure Canada app and prove that we’d paid for that night too. We finally got in our room about 6 am and promptly went to bed.

Later the same day:

We woke up about 10:15 and rushed to get the included breakfast before it closed at 10:30. We had a quick bite and then went back to the room to sleep. We woke up again about 1:30. We stayed in the room for a while, John was planning a trek around town for tomorrow using the Lonely Planet Guide while I tried to finish the Cruise blog. Then we went to the Blue Harmony Spa to buy John a bathing suit as he didn't think to bring one, and they have two great pools here, one indoors and one outdoors. It was difficult with the language gap to express our want their needs but we finally figured out the hotel needs payment in Uzbeki cash so he exchanged $200US and got over 2.5 million Uzbekistani Som! We went for a walk down the street and through a local park. The temperature was about 25. Then we went back to the Wyndham Hotel and had a couple of beers at an outdoor restaurant. Then we went to a really nice local restaurant called 'Restaurant 1981' recommended by the hotel staff and had a nice meal. All the service people we’ve met have been young and very anxious to please. Then we headed back to the hotel and I went for a ‘swim’ in the pool and John talked to Lindsay. In bed by 10:30.